


E.T. - Extra Territorial

by kindlyclears, Mamcine_Oxfeather



Series: i n t e r . m i s s i o n [s] [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: AU: different game ending, Alternate Universe, Bulges and Nooks, M/M, Other, Polyamory, Quadrant Vacillation, Xenobiology, all quadrants all ships all the time
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-22
Updated: 2017-11-03
Packaged: 2018-11-17 10:53:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11273970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kindlyclears/pseuds/kindlyclears, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mamcine_Oxfeather/pseuds/Mamcine_Oxfeather
Summary: They had been given the choice for their victory - break the game and return to the way things were, or accept their boon planet for the conquering and allow the ambition of their now bereft Condesce to infect the multiverse.  Advocate Vantas gave up paradise to save all of Trollkind, and they made him a janitor.Dave Strider is still struggling with his crash-course introduction to multiverse theory, not to mention the heavy load of laundry that is an entire ship of aliens on his back friggin lawn.  It's gonna be an exciting weekend.





	1. Season 1 Episode 01

**e x t r a t e r r i t o r i a l**

ep 01

<//>alltheworldsastage.mp4</sloMo-0.96>

The East Coast was winding down to its late autumn doze, the gold of its sunset washing back from over the gray drab roll of forested hills, a cloak of early winter air settling atop the earth's blanket of dead-wet leaves, heavy and thick. Here, the staid mountains kept to the boundaries of their wilderness, uncrossed by highway, peopled sparse with hardy neighbor-towns and Ranger outposts. The houses that bordered the national park did so few and far between, their property lines dotting a lone, winding dirt road like errant quilt patchworks not yet drawn together under the thread.

Dave Strider, 24 years of life to his name, lived now in one such house, a modest A-frame dwarfed by the land it preceded. The largest of the soft-bark deciduous monsters had been carved down to clear something like a respectable yard, bare of grass that could not spring from the acidic pine dirt, covered instead by fragrant clover that was cool underfoot on even the balmiest summer days (or some shit).

<//>recordscratch.lii</skip>

Look, if you walked into this meta expecting Robert Frost, it's gonna be like that time your parents took your nine-year-old-ass to see Avenue Q because they figured hey, puppets, right? Sure, yeah, there's puppets - at first. And just the same as ol' Bobby F. had a way with words, shit is going to get hella descriptive, not gonna lie. But soon, maybe as soon as the first brightly colored foam-flap lets fly its virgin-voyage F-Bomb and your parents' eyes sort of glaze over with the conflict between their parental scandal and the spark of long-denied adulthood amusement; soon enough you're going to realize this ain't no High-King-Wordsmith-Sir-Robert-the-Chill missive.

And you'll need to make the decision your parents had to make; which one of you is going home with the kid and which one will insist on staying behind to get your fucking money's worth? This metaphor sucks, because you're only the one person, you say? Are you sure? Not 'are you sure the metaphor sucks' - it is kinda complicated, we can revisit that, I mean; are you sure you're only just the one person?

So Dave Strider, D-Stride, Sizzle to your Dizzle, 24 smacking rotations around the yellow sun, had got it in his mind to - oh shit, wait, hang on

<//>lowridermix.mp4</ballast-0.98@0:02:18-1.14@0:02:56>

So Dave, right, Dave strolls up on all this beautiful nature on the daily, like it's his business (it is his literal actual breadwinning business, film at eleven). There is a slouch in his step that disappears by the necessity of the hike, spine straightening, chest laboring, head lifted to chart the way safely up the mountainside, and by the time he retakes the path the slouch is gone, as if he only had to remove himself from any hint of prying eyes to walk tall, even if those eyes were only the empty windows of his modest home.

Dave wore a canvas backpack over his bright red Goosedown Vest, boxy with lightweight aluminum supports, tools within clattering hollowly as he strode (heh, strider, get it).  By the end of the day's hike, much segregated forest loot weighed that backpack down and slowed Dave's stroll, muffled in its own rotting flesh and plastic grocery-bag padding. The raccoon corpse was fresh enough that it only barely stank, rounding out the success of the day's haul - a pair of riverbed antlers, a snake shed, and a dried-to-the-tendons opossum skeleton that had been too high in the tree for anything but the birds to reach.

The day's grift was good, the sun was setting, and Dave Strider was way too Texan to suffer the East Coast autumn cold post-sundown if he didn't have to, smelling like so much bear bait besides. He knelt to inspect a landmark hidey-hole at the base of a half-dead oak, in which a familiar corvid liked to stow baubles. Dave fished a dead mouse from its ziplock (bought frozen, in bulk, to supplement the meat he was taking away from the ecosystem) to leave inside the stash, trading for an old penny and a brass button, the luster of historical value gleaming just under the bird filth.

A similar gleam caught on the ridge of D-Stride's superswank A-list aviator sunglasses, or what hikers would more casually refer to as 'shades'. Hikers and, probably, most other people? Whatever, the shades are important later on (and before that they were also important; these things kind of foreshadow AND aft-shadow and now you know that aft is totally a word [ #lookitup ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aft)). Dave followed the gleam in the woods, pale brows lowered in a squint as he stepped past the oak and off the path to the flat of the ridge-base, where a copse of younger treegrowth had been lain completely flat, crop-circle style.

Dave's mouth twisted up in doubt, even as he laid his aviator gaze on what-all it was glint-glowing from under a scud of leaflitter.

<//>x-filesremix.midi</layer>x-filesintrumental.mp4</sloMo-0.86>

It looked like an oversized snowboard some douchebag ski-tourist from 1984 would have left behind after they'd beefed their own mortality on a snowy mountain too full of trees to brave sober. But the design was uncomfortably organic, like [ H.R. Giger ](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._R._Giger) had taken a crack at marketing to the dayglo new-credit crowd of bunny hills past; the thing now broken cleanly in two, insides pulsing, leaking a green fluid that smelled too powerfully of ozone to be anything like a prank; no cameras in the trees, no giggling show-host to pop out from behind a brush pile. Transfixed, Dave fished his phone out of his pocket and got as close as he deemed radioactively sound, snapping a few pictures of the break, the outside with its chitinous-looking whorls and grooves. It wasn’t until he’d finished cataloging his find that he realized just how dark it was getting, and how foreboding the woods had become in the scant minutes he’d dawdled.

Dread crawled up Dave's back and tickled the nape of his neck as he finished marking the site on the worn canvas terrain map he kept in a cargo-pant pocket, and he stuffed the sharpie back in its cap with the loud snap of sudden haste, checking that all equipment and tools were zipped up back in place, pulling the hood of his dark thermal sweater over his white-blonde hair. He suddenly did not want to be noticed, by neither prank show host nor government satellite surveillance, and took to descending the mountain sans-path; all semblance of stealth thrown out the window like a baby in some bathwater, accidentally and tragically and at risk of bodily harm to some sort of human (in which case Dave would have to be the baby chucked out with the bathwater of subterfuge but I think you get the point let's move on).

Through the veil of panic and a rain of soggy leaves Dave's weathered boots found the hard-packed dirt of the bottom-ridge path; he could have keeled over right then of relief, if not for the fact that the way homewards was blocked by the goddamn Bigfoot.

The Bigfoot in a hoodie and jeans, apparently, who - oh shit, wait,

<//>ominousfuckingintroduction.mp3</bass@-0.50>

The Bigfoot in t-shirt and jeans, apparently, which was kind of a rude way to describe a hugedude just trying to maybe get his hike on in comfortable daywear, but whatevs. Dave had been spending a lot of time alone, it was making him paranoid and fanciful, and right then Shadowform Shaquille O'motherfuckin'Neal taking a picnic in the middle of the woods was going to feel an awful lot like a mythical goddamn encounter.

There was no way the thing (#woah #racist) hadn’t heard him, straightening from its crouch _in the goddamn dark, in the middle of the forest,_ dressed innocuously in hoodie and jeans like any hitch-hiker from any murderstory ever. At the sight of a scowling gray face with dark heavy brows, Dave found himself creeping backwards, several billion years’ worth of primordial amoeba instincts screaming at him to _run_ (or, well, phalange-scuttle), _that thing_ (WOAH RACIST) _could snap your spine over its knee like dry kindling_ \- and then nothing, suddenly, because the forest floor was tilting away into black star-dusted sky, Dave's feet swept out from under him by nothing worse than his own momentum and a rot-shed branch at the back of his heel.

Dave hit the ground hard, evicting his breath like it owed rent and sending white lights to swarm his vision. The adrenaline managed to get him upright in a tumble of limbs and backpack, but the creature (#tw #soracist) with its huge head turned towards him, its eyes flashing red and yellow in the moonlight, mouth slack to bare rows of jagged white teeth – the sight paralyzed Dave, and brought all thought to a well-oiled and silent stop.

Dave Strider's mouth, though, had been stuck on autopilot since before he even knew what words _were_ , as impulsive with his middle finger and thumbs-up the way most toddlers were with throwing shit just to reassure themselves gravity still worked. Dave always _always_ had a contentious yet respectful agreement with gravity, but words - words _overruled him_.

"Fuck, listen, man, I’m pretty sure I taste terrible, I mean not that I would know for certain ‘cause autocannibalism is sorta frowned upon around here? But like, I eat nothing but Hot Pockets and Cheetos on a regular fucking basis, I’ve gotta taste like nothing but preservatives, c’mon, that’s not appetizing at all -" Now gathered parallel to this babble, Dave's life was not flashing behind his eyes so much as exposing its gaps and failures like the pock burn of a torn filmreel - he didn't know if he _was_ actually 24 entire rotations around the yellow sun, for instance, or who his parents had been, where he'd come from before his bro had filed for custody - painfully urgent lifeproblems he'd been putting off under the arrogance of perceived youth and good health and shrugging assumptions; and now these mysteries crammed themselves to the forefront of Dave's clamoring panic, _you can't die now douchebag, we don't yet know if you were cooked up in a government lab or dropped off in a bin by an inbred meth abuser_.

The tallman's coarse black hair fell around his face in an early Reznor imitation (but was otherwise nothing at all sasquatchian or wookie), and he pushed this haphazard clump away from his eyes (yellow sclera, shitjesus actually glowing red irises, like the phosphor smear of tail lights on wet highway) to squint. The hand fell down, adjusted a bauble unseen at the collar of its t-shirt, radio static leaping into the air between the places the wind fell still.

Dave's babble ran dry and hollow, lilting where his thoughts headbutted through his panic, the tin-can reverb of his own voice echoing back through the radio static coming from the tallman, "- and d-dude, because then we'll never get to find out if it was Colonel Mustard with the lead pipe in the Ballroom and, heh, I mean since when was that never a hilarious thing to call a dance hall, right?" The words now gone garbled as they filtered through the small metal translator seen gleaming at the tallman's collar, a rapid clicking staccato.

When the roadstranger opened his mouth to answer, his black lips formed no consonants - sharp teeth clicking and throat working to carefully enunciate _something_ , which then warbled out from the translator at his throat in static-scratch ALLCAPS EMPHATICS, weirdly human in its inflections and tone and flat english newscaster accent.  "HOMINIDS DON'T EAT OTHER HOMINIDS, SHITSPECK."

Dave had fallen still, hands raised and foot settled back to take his weight for a bolt, his flash-step rusty from disuse (film at eleven).  His shades slumped down his face as if in their own surprise, and now he could better see the dude in front of him sans terror-film, blood pushing through his veins like tapioca beads through a bubbletea straw.

The stranger winced, fiddling with the translator to dial the volume down.  "But I'll take some of those thermal bread-satchels or cheese crusts you mentioned, if you're trying to barter for your life here or something.  Or maybe you should just get back to your guardian and stop offering figurative candy to literal strangers, pupa."  
  
Like breaking water face-first off the high dive, Dave was jarred from reality.  First and foremost was the condescending _tone_ of the stranger's suggestion - as if Worf over there had just mistaken him for some _kid_ , when even through his teenaged years he'd been way too tall for that kinda mistake.  Secondly was the numbing wash of shock that came from encountering something / someone so far removed from reality - but if Dave could politely deal with the Mormons who ran the General Goods in town he could probably muster some manners for ... a... body mod enthusiast separated from his circus troupe?

"I'm... uh," Dave finished his step back, spine straightening, aviators pushed up his nose despite how they worsened the shadows.  The words come out clipped, detached, final - "My guardian is dead."  Which wasn't the point - not really, he was presumably twentygoddamnfour, he didn't need a guardian and holy shit even the fact that Roadstrange ShadowShaq had _said that_ , 'guardian', as in 'ask your parent, or -' on all the school forms, was a double blow to Dave's tenuous hold on his own sanity.  He tasted bile.  His breath _burned_.

Giganto McScowly listened to the chirrup-clicks of the delayed translation, expression softening.  He turned to gather a small heap of items off the side of the path - carapaced instruments and the blue glow of a square that resolved into a laptop (?) screen, each disappearing at the controlled wag of a sylladex, which was tucked neatly into the guy's back pocket like a camp counselor hiding his pack of cigarettes _god_ Dave could really use a cigarette.  Before the stranger could deliver some offhand sympathy, Dave interjected -  
  
"I mean, I don't _need_ a guardian.  I'm -" only maybe 24? "a grown-ass adult, believe it or not.  And don't you just look like Gulliver all landed up on the island of Liliput?"  Dave whistled low, hands in pockets, observing himself do and say these things as if from behind a one-way mirror.  "Can I ask you what the hell you're doing on this mountain?  Besides scaring the perfect jesus out of hikers?"

Another contemplative pause as the translator clicked and purred, the stranger's phosphor gaze flickering across the path as if reading the words laid out in the damp dirt.  "Foraging."

The following awkward silence buffeted against the inside of Dave's skull.  "Wull.  Uh."  He put two fingers to his temple in what he hoped was a boy-scout salute and not something really rude in Italian.  "I guess that's what the mountain is for."  Dave motioned up the way he had just slid, "Hey, watch out for -" the wrecked thing in the woods, and his stomach melted in an acid pool of terror and drained down into his toes, burning the whole way. He'd broken into enough abandoned mental hospitals and run down factories and deserted quarries to know when he'd seen something that he really, really should not have seen. He had _pictures_.  And now this guy, too weird to be an unrelated coincidence, and oh man he did _not_ want to deal with shadyshoes government cover-ups, not on a Monday, no.

"... Watch out for what?  Falling nerds?" the stranger quipped, removing _an item_ from what looked like a strife specibus straight out the hoodie pocket, its blade curved and gleaming and its handle neon-Geiger.

Dave's heartbeat stuttered, then tripled.

Pathlurk Eyelights strode nonchalantly into the underbrush, crouching with a grace that was less the goofy basketball player and more tiger-in-the-woods.  The weapon was wielded against a fern, neatly cut frond disappearing into the click-shake of the sylladex.

Oh.  Foraging.  With a harvest scythe.   _Made sense_.

Dave nodded, warbled out a "Yeah, good luck with your, uh, all of that," and turned down the path leading home like a deep sea diver flipper-walking the ocean floor, sharks overhead.


	2. S01 E02: Gods

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so basically this started out "what if, E.T., but trolls" and turned into explicit xeno
> 
> also i finally tried out some site skins and dat burlap sack background tho  
> @ 3@

* * *

**e x t r a t e r r i t o r i a l**

ep 02

* * *

"You HORNSPLITTING GRUBFUCKS," Advocate Vantas rang over the comm link, the dim blue cabin of the hopper shuttle now robbed of its professional serenity.  "The missive clearly fucking said SUNDOWN, as in the yellow goddamn SUN this planet ORBITS would have to be BELOW THE VISIBLE LINE OF THE FUCKING TERRACRUST, **SHITHEELED PESTERDICKS."**

A fanged First Officer muttered into the open channel, voice dry and drawling in its chuckling rasp, "Think Vantas might have some appreciation for our punctual delivery."

"I think he's dayblind," snickered another.

One sang haughtily into the comms, teeth a sawbones in the glinting calibrator light, "If you show up late to departure, we're leaving without you."

This, answered only by a crackling static of recriminating oaths so pure in rage it twisted the audio signal to a high whine of white-hot transmitter distress.

* * *

 Alternia citizen Karkat Vantas, Advocate for the Offices of Foreign Field Survey (OFFS), captchalogued his field-harvest scythes and stood to rub fragrant pine sap from the heels of his palms, eye toward the early evening horizon and the planet's risen moon - studying the cradle of the galaxy branch that shone in a milky spill of stars just beside it. Fear lanced through his chest as the cloaked hopper's engines growled to life half a mile away.  "I STILL HAVE TWO STANDARD EARTH HOURS," Vantas protested into his comm, palming the captchalogue at his belt to shake out the OFFS hoverboard - which, at first kick, broke clean in two, dumping its passenger to the forest floor.

Coughing out a mouthful of leaflitter, Vantas scrabbled to his feet and started running.

"You're late," mocked the audio in a tinny rasp from his collar.  "We've given up hope of your return.  You will be listed MIA, and mourned appropriately."

"I'M RIGHT FUCKING HERE, SHITWITCH."  Vantas rounded a tree copse just as the docking hatch was folding back into the ship, slamming bodily against the smooth hull with both fists pounding.  "YOU DICKS CAN'T DO THIS TO ME AGAIN!"

"Actually," the Captain's nasal drone interrupted, "It says right here in our directive to seed livable planets with any lowbloods we deem expendable, weakening their generational offspring so that their future subjectification might go all the smoother."

"Don't be such a pissbaby grub about this," the First Officer urged.  "Kick back, relax, fuck a gross alien wife, try not to get eaten."

"HOMINIDS DON'T EAT OTHER HOMINIDS!" Vantas argued, pedantic to the last.  He shouted further protest, but the ship was lifting off in a loud churn of engine - soon ten, twenty, fifty feet out of reach, then cloaked, silenced, gone, presumably back to the large colonial mining ship trawling that milky galaxy branch visible beyond that moon.

Karkat fell to a sit, grumbling to himself as he picked sap and splinters from the rough grey callouses of his palms, fingernails sharp and thick and yellow, grimace revealing a row of pointed teeth behind thin black lips.  His dense black hair stirred in a dry wind, revealing two red-orange-yellow horns, tapered conical nubs no larger than doorknobs.  For an Alternian, Karkat Vantas was a runt, shorter than most with a grub-like padding of fat. For a Hominid like a Terran, however, Karkat's middling-to-adult size was monstrous, muscles coiled and dense, cheekbones high and brows heavy. The yellow of his eye stroma blended to the red of his iris and the black of his pupil like a spill of ink across glass, a glaring squint of color in a dusky gray face.

Karkat stood with a growling set of clicks and hisses, crushing his commlink earpiece in hand before throwing it to the dirt and stomping it under his boot heel.  He settled his anger with a few deep breaths, then captchalogued his military uniform for a set of civilian clothes by which to better integrate - at least until he could find the tech to build a high signal communicator.  The guy in charge of the mining frigate, General fucking Makara, his everloving MOIRAIL, wouldn't leave him to just ROT on some mudball planet surrounded by the stink-diseased idiot aliens what lived there.

Miles above, the small recon crew on the hopper all turned toward a single oval screen, on which already blinked the contact icon of the Merry Brotherhood, an inverted laughing face, purple and black.

* * *

 


	3. S01 E03: Visitor

**e x t r a t e r r i t o r i a l**

ep 03

<<tightrope.mp@04:11-04:13><dib spnx="4bec13">run.dll</dib>run//"run">

Dave's sleep ran dark and fevered.  Whirling teeth gnashed at yellow eyes sunk through the sockets of dark red skulls. His legs burned and lungs clenched as he flash-stepped through the mountain forest of horns and bone, leaping dark puddles of rainbow metallic car paint and crumbled crayola; then through old familiar Houston streets, black pavement still sun-warm under a raucous city night; and then he was standing on the ledge of a high flat roof, wind battering his damp forehead with carrion heat, a long cool blade at his throat and a deep voice numbering the ways in which Dave had disappointed, failed, how he was selfish and wrong and weak. Just as the skin beneath the blade broke, blood welling and rolling down to the hollow of his collarbone, heavy hands dropped on his shoulders, gripped tightly and pulled him backwards, and then he was dropping up into the deep empty wash of the night sky, the roof rapidly accelerating out of view -  
  
Dave snorted awake, his sleep-muzzy thoughts sock-static clung to the technicolor gut-rot of the fading nightmare; the blankets tangled around his legs, trapping him soundly.  Rain drummed rising applause against the windows, the weak gray light filtering like shitty drip coffee onto his face, cold sleep-sweat gathered in awful chilly patches under his arms and his neck and behind his knees - every spot of skin gone sharp and hot with a new sheen at the distinct and terrifying crack of the back door getting kicked in. 

Dave stilled, filing through the possibilities - that hadn't been thunder, and no fucking way it was anyone from the neighborhood begging emergency, the closest house was miles away and only that much closer to a police phone. Government spooks? Possible, but not fucking likely; they had already asked their questions when the elder Strider went down.  Weirdo goddamn bodymod hiker (which Dave refused to classify as an alien the way a housewife might insist a kitchen-sighted cockroach was just a new specie of particularly swift cricket)? Cautiously, Dave shifted, in a manner as close to sleep as possible, fake sighing, his hand flung out to rest just inches away from the sword stuffed between wall and mattress.  
  
Breath even and quiet, Dave listened. He could hear a voice, distinctly hoarse and grating in its clicks and chirrs, and he could also hear another answering, serpentine and smug filtering through the unmistakable static of an audio speaker. Then sounded a distinct knock, the dull smack of something blunt against the house. Dave curved his spine, slowly, sighing a deep somnolent breath to sell the deception, and his fingers curled around that well-worn leather binding the hilt of a weapon he'd known longer than he'd known his own name, sharp and serviceable. There was another smack, this one a hollow crack like a bo staff hitting a skull, and when he heard the primary voice again, it was slurred, uneasy. Dave swallowed, took another deep breath, dragged his legs free of his blankets, and flash-stepped.  
  
It was harder than he remembered, and he wasn't as balanced as preferred when he came out of the rush of light and color, but he was facing the right way and fuck, that was half the battle. In the space of a blink Dave was in the kitchen, and holy fucking shit the hiking trail cryptid was raiding his fridge like an actual fuckdamn bear, back door ajar in a frame dented from the no doubt hilarious slap-stick entry. From his crouch Dave brought himself and his sword up into the squared light of the open fridge, bedheaded in flannel pajama pants, sword point pressed just at the slope between gray throat and chin.  
  
"Y'all just have the worst manners," Dave drawled, drawing himself up just a little straighter, sliding the blade further along the intruder's neck, violin bow priming a dangerous song. "And as endearing as the American public all found Mort and Alf and, fuck, I dunno, Harry of the Henderson's - I'd appreciate any one of those affable mascots all the more for getting the fuck out of my house, if it ain't any sorta imposition of course, thanks so fuckin' much."

Shadow-Shaq stood with all due langsam, headlight eyes above a maw full of sliced ham.  He curled his lip, clawed fingers delicately pinching the blade nearer its center, bending the metal effortlessly until it snapped with a too-clear twang.  As the blade clattered to the floor, the intruder tilts its head back to swallow the rest of the ham unchewed, reptilian.  The hiss-snicker of its companion's voice chatters from the depths of its black sweater, the hood of which had fallen back in the swallow to reveal a set of vibrant horns - and Dave was never the religious type, even in the tender years such gullibility would have been warranted, but hell if his first thought wasn't, fuck, scratch aliens and myths, this here was a _bonafide satan_. 

Satan number two finally fell radio silent, then prompted a set of clicks unmistakably in question.

Satan number one grunted in answer, stuffed his hand in his hoodie pocket to silence whatever device lay within, and jerked his chin Dave's way.  "This your hive?" the translator at his collar filtered through the burr of his clicks.

Dave had stood gaping at his broken sword, grip gone weak from despair.  "I... yeah?" he answered, dazed.  "That's kinda what I just implied, what with the request to vacate the premises 'n all.  Hive, house, den, batcave,  _abode_.  You're burgling the castle of which I get to call myself king, et cetera."  He dropped the half-sword with a disgust for his circumstances. "Make yourself at home, I guess.  Maybe update your Google Translate so you don't sound like such a fuckin' Romulan."  And, as said Romulan continued to stuff raw eggs wholesale down his throat, Dave snatched a chair from the breakfast nook in which to collapse, fingers scrubbing through hair and elbows bracing to knees.

It was a tidy house, spartan and low-tech, corners and shelves otherwise cluttered with tools and books.  Nothing particularly ironic or flashy or trending, a relaxing departure from his early city life, all worn linoleum and age-softened wood.  His fucking refuge from the weird circus of shit that had been his upbringing, and there the circus had busted right in to scoop literal mayonnaise directly out of the jar with two fingers and a violently red tongue before giving up to crunch right through the plastic, teeth as yellow and jagged as its claws.

Dave watched, frozen in embittered rapture, as a Desaturated Klingon made swift work of his refrigerator and started on what dry stock could be found in the kitchen cabinets, crunching through a cardboard canister of oatmeal and gnashing it garbage-disposal style before working it down his gullet with a fascinating set of anatomically divergent throat-maneuvers.  Dave shifted his weight in the chair to lean an elbow back atop the table, debating silently behind two fingers at his chin before reaching over behind a pumpkin-cornucopia centerpiece, a glass decanter of unlabeled but no doubt expensive bourbon slid into grip.  The table deco was from an old penpal, as housewarming, and the whiskey had been shared between he and his equally estranged orphan maybe-sister the day they put Broderick Strider in the incinerator.

The stranger slid the garbage can out from its fridgeside tuck to rifle free a blackened banana peel that went down like a spaghetti noodle in the mayonnaise sauce.  Wiping the splatter of viscera from the end of his crookedly healed nose, "Before you open your pearl-crowded gumflap about this being a discard receptacle I'm looting, yes, I am aware of your peoples' obscene wastefulness when it comes to edible organic matter; and fucking take my word I could eat the tree-skeletons this hive is made from if that was all I could steal." He squared his stance, facing Dave with an embarrassed glower.  "This is a shameful gogdamn situation I'm in, and I don't need any extra strifing with any upstart native fauna on top of everything else, pinkmeat."

After the first burning mouthful of supposedly 'smooth' bourbon, Dave coughed out an introduction Tarzan-Jane style, sputtering his name in a rasp and pounding his chest, in case, y'know, naming himself might endear or humanize, save him the gruesome death sure to descend once that thing reached the bottom of the poptarts box.  His expectation for return stalled as the anti-Spock displayed an intelligence on par with the average stoner and actually fucking put the frozen waffles in the actual fucking toaster and managed to compose coffee grounds into a filter and refill the fucking percolator from the sink, though the starter buttons gave him a few blue-light fumbles.

Dave studied the face that was now scowling thoughtfully over a large chitin-whorled laptop uncaptcha'd atop the island counter, taking mental notes on all the pale grey scars glancing across jaw and over the knuckles of swiftly typing fingers, and maybe on closer study the guy didn't look so healthy, dark circles bruised under those liquid technicolor eyes.  Dave rubbed the ache of the evening's mountainside pratfall from the hollow of his chest and cleared his throat to croak, weakly, "I dunno what your sources are, man, but hominids eat each other all the time."  And just like that, the motor of Dave's ramble was revved to life.  "Not that  _I_ do, but it happens, so if I can get a guarantee you're not gonna steal my kidneys or, what, that you're not a criminal wanted by some intergalactic high council; I mean I ain't dealing with bounty hunters from Beta Centauri on a Monday, I can tell you that much - and shit, I guess, let's shelve my completely conditional and totally unnecessary invitation of hospitality here for a minute, but you  _are_  an alien, right?"

Allowing for english-to-gigantor lag, " _You're_  the alien, pupa, I'm a ____" the translator stalled out despite the rapid onslaught of retort and, for lack of better word, provided 'troll'.  "And if you're going to be a _highly fucking specific_ asswipe about it, yeah, culturally evolved bipeds aren't bereft their cannibalism; but I am going to posit that hominids don't  _normally_  eat each other.  Unless this is some sorta inbred planet where all your digestive chutes got _highly fucking specific_ allergies to this zoological buffet you're all living in; let's at least be _really highly fucking specific_ about this, shall we?" He (?) chopped his hands at the laptop (?) and continued.  "I mean I now know some of you diseased cretins shit yourselves and DIE if you eat a groundbean that your mammalian milk-lusus couldn't eat, but Jegas _damn_ you don't all run around stoning each other for the mealbox now do you?  Get your fucking hivestead fortified against these supposed hominid hunting parties and I'll promise not to harvest your urine-sieves.  To your knowledge."

Dave's mouth quirked up on one side about the same time the bourbon soaked in through the lining of his empty stomach and pummeled his bloodstream with sudden warmth - but hot-damn if he wasn't impressed by the sheer wordsmithery of this barbaric intellectual.  Aliens: how do they work.  "Cool story," he wheezed past another hard swallow of bourbon, muscling through the gag reflex as his body violently recalled its first, only, and lasting impression of Too Much Of This Sort Of Thing.  Dave belched against the back of his wrist, then scrubbed his bared eyes - what, was the red-eyed kitchenghoul really gonna give him shit for being caught out in full leucistic glory, sans shades?  Was the map of scars down Dave's bare arms and torso going to, at any point, volunteer itself as topic of discussion, with the alien whose left eyebrow still drooped a little under a clearly botched suture job?  "Can we revisit the part where you keep calling me out as a pupa?  As in, undeveloped?  Check your wiki pages again, slick, I'm the young adult model if I'm anything.  Not yet the chrysalis with the dad-belly, nor the majestic butterfly of the crippled geriatric, but definitely past the chubby worm stage."

"Car-Cat," the translator prompted from a burbled two-syllable set of clicks.

Dave blinked.  "Eh.  Bike, dog?  Hike, log?  Flinstone feet under that prehistoric ve-hicle, but screen still showin' us pollution, smog?"  He tossed the glass decanter stopper up and caught it, grinning, hand working an invisible turntable.  "Tell me if your machinery starts to smoke, if I'm going too fast, I'm gonna hafta ask, you to let, me know.  And every line here yeah it's spoke, in rhyme, but through your ears it won't turn out clear, you won't get to hear the music through the rote.  Note.  Fuck.  That pacing was... wow, that was bad.  I'm sorry.  Not a kid."  The stopper was replaced, then removed again, the brandy went down a bit easier, heavy decanter clattering musically atop the thick wooden table.  (And here Dave's alcohol tolerance was still garbage, which was probably a good thing.  Cheap date, fairly undented liver.) 

Pre-Apocalyptic Fridge-Raider stifled the translator with two fingers, throat and jaw working expressively to enunciate - "Karrh-khat.  Daeb-stry-dhr." 

Dave stared, owl-eyed under sunken brows, torn between the surge of need to protect this grotesque cinnamon roll and - uh.  Being too immediately drunk to know what else.  He closed his mouth with a snap of teeth, and sighed hard through his nose.  "Okay.  Karkat.  Still not hearing you on that whole please-don't-be-an-escaped-convict-from-the-Jupiter-Penitentiary thing."  Carefully, Dave stretched a leg out to toe the fridge door shut, draping the kitchen in early morning rain-gray, blue laptop light and that strange warm wash from Karkat's eyes.  

The waffles sprang from the toaster and startled them both, and Karkat set about pouring himself a hilariously undersized mug of coffee, succinctly delicate despite the brutish display at the fridge earlier.  "I'm not a convict.  I don't even usually steal, but they didn't exactly drop me a provisions crate, or warn me I'd be down here for more than a night."  Methodically, Karkat began to tidy food from counter and floor, gracefully navigating a space built two sizes too small.  "I'm a field researcher for a fairly unimportant new mining scud in Her Imperial Condescension's Navy; formerly Advocate Vantas under the houses Beliat, Serket, and Fronne.  It is unlikely I'll need to, or even _want to_ , harvest and consume your organs; not unless the area runs out of edible protein.  And that's an exaggeration for comedic effect, if you couldn't gogdamn tell, but in all seriousness, your sun does weird things to troll metabolism and I've never been hungrier in all twelve sweeps of my shitty, amazing life - which I suspect was the spurring factoid behind this little abandonment prank my shitbird crew likes to pull every other breathable planet we map." 

Dave's nod had just risen higher with each new conversational reveal, until he was watching Karkat with his whole throat exposed, waiting for the end where he could bring the nod down, slowly, and bob in a few more, shallower nods, possibly whilst staring into the middle distance, thoughtful and distinguished.  Instead, he just kept his chin raised, and cinched his squint tighter as Karkat caught a glance of him and answered with a reaction that could only be described as just-spotted-favorite-president-at-the-local-Dairy-Queen, equal parts alarmed, reverent, and bitter at oneself for feeling both because hey, hey, the president was a human being just like the rest of us, they didn't need our grovelling just trying to get their tasty summertime treat. 

"First," Dave croaked from his position, attention flickering from Karkat's suddenly tense shoulders to the mug of coffee he'd nearly dropped on his keyboard.  "They, who?  Leaving you down, here, from up, where?" 

Karkat grunted uncertainly.  "Well our home planet's called Alternia, but we don't stay there past pupahood.  Our current Queen is the Condesce, which makes us the collective Condescension, labeled and tiered by faction, role, rank, house and hemospectrum.  So, 'they' as in the crew of the scout hopper assigned to this solar system.  'Up, where' as in the fleet of the mining operation assigned to this galaxy, in the universe bid on by house Ampora, for its high concentration of water-bearing di-nodic amplicard candidates and hey could you stop doing that?  Seriously, grubstink, I get that you're pailbait and I'm probably the biggest breathing thing that's ever visited this sad little woodhive.  Message received, now stop making everyone in this room uncomfortable." 

Dave lowered the bourbon from his mouth and winced in apology, resolutely stuffing the stoppered decanter back behind the cornucopia, thumbing dust from a waxy fake grape leaf.  "The more you tell me the more questions I got," he confessed, vowels gone thick but mental faculties otherwise sharp behind the liquor-dulled sense of alarm and shock.  "Most pressing, like," a lazy chuckle, the chair creaking as it took his weight against its back, " _Again_ , not jailbait." 

Karkat's paws curled over his keyboard, shoulders hitching up.  "Okay, cool, and  _again,_  maybe we just stop reiterating how fuckable you are." 

The two front chair legs that had started to hover from the linoleum slammed down as Dave sat forward sharply.  "What?  No, just stop calling me a kid!" 

"What the FUCK ELSE am I supposed to call someone so SMALL?" 

Dave's mouth went crooked as he struggled not to answer, but lost: "How about 'Your Majesty'?" and his chest hitched with a cackle gone unvoiced, effectively stifled by an out-of-practice pokerface, replete with rubbing a fake knot of tension out of the back of his neck, chin lifting.

Karkat's nose wrinkled up on one side, nostrils flaring.  "I'M UNCOMFORTABLE," he squawked, clipping his laptop shut.  "And your stupid fucking SUN is over the horizon ALREADY, so I'm going to go ahead and commandeer your castle dungeon; providing it's not overrun by subterranean cannibals.  Put your neck away, douchelord, there's no quadrant available for 'disgusting alien wife'."

"Karkat am I to exist under the impression that I've been  _flashing_ you every time I do thi~s?"  Dave rolled his head against one shoulder, swallowing to bob his adam's apple in illustration. 

Karkat flushed a darker gray and the translator didn't even attempt to parse the chirr that came out of him, but he clacked his teeth together under his scowl and dumped his coffee mug in the sink decisively.  "Cut it out, face-ache."

"Relax,"  Dave leveled his chin properly.  "Not female, so.  Wife threat disengaged."  He stood, dusting his hands together, and wobbled a bit when he looked all the way up at the size of this visiting officiator - who watched him sidelong from the sink, in worse shape under the proper lighting of the rainy dawn, cheeks sharp and drawn.  "You can use the cellar, sure.  We'll find you something to do tomorrow night, to pay back on what you've taken.  _Providing_ you don't harvest any  _important_ organs, to my knowledge or otherwise.  Cos that would kill me." 

But on showcasing the dirt-wall cellar and its corner clutter of cleaning supplies, Dave was rewarded an exasperated scoff and scandalised complaint, shoved nearly over the stair's gritty handrail.  At the end of the shaking climb back up the stairs he found Karkat belly-down on the kitchen floor, torso tucked under the breakfast table, four makeshift tent-walls fortified against the daylight by the unmistakable foil of a fire blanket.  Karkat's dark grey jeans had fallen up to reveal canvas sneakers and two white scars, thick and dead-nerve smooth, denting the circumference of his bared ankles.


	4. S01 E04: Gods pt 2

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**e x t r a t e r r i t o r i a l**

ep 04

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Midshipman Megido, willowy and gaunt in a rust-trimmed jumpsuit, perched at the large gummy mess of the hopper’s deploy console, brow knit in concentration while Xenozoologist Leijon scratched a graph into a blank span of hull nearby.

“I get why you’re here,” Leijon insisted, squat and athletic, arms busy painting metal in wide sweeping brush-strokes.  “And I get why Nitram is here, and Zahhak and all the rest who got quadrant-listed for this survey, and I definitely know why I’M here, but,” her scrawling pauses, and she knocks a thick hand against a square with a violet splatter.  “I can’t honestly guess why _that loser_  had to come along, much less put himself in charge.  He's not in anyone's quadrant, and this is a huge step down in rank.  Shouldn't he be seabound to some flooded planet in the Algernines, strifing chumps and feeding Gl'bgolyb?”

“I’m RIGHT HERE,” Captain Ampora griped from his high stationed seat, to a round of snickers.

“But _why_ are you here, Eridan?” Leijon pressed, informal despite the gap in their social strata, stepping back to review her grafitti.  “Resource Ops only staff crew in stabilized quadrant locks.  Are you being punished for -”

“I’m placeholding for Makara during his idiotic religious sojourn, OBVIOUSLY.” Ampora answered, flicking his high collar upright to cover the dark lines of his gills.  “As a fellow highblood, the job could be trusted to none else.”

Leijon muttered under her breath, “Job could have gone to Equius, easily,” and the rest of the hour was spent on inquisitive glances from the wall graph to the ragtag handful of pupahood friends busy at their consoles and platforms.  Theirs WAS a stable team of flushed and pale cooperation, had been even before Academy, despite the random vacillations of pitch and ash that never seemed to settle for long between any two friends.  Ships generally ran safer and more efficient if everybody had their moirail in reach, and mission weariness cut back significantly with in-crew rotation of concupiscent partners - hence the presence of extraneous lowbloods such as Megido and Vantas, despite their default designations of dirtside duty.

Megido tapped in coordinates to report their position, safely mapping a corner of orbit in which the satellite departure could course, silent with thought.

“We aren’t actually leaving Karkat behind, are we?” Leijon broke the silence again, pacing over to a table with an open Terran cadaver leaking its funeral juices, to hold a rib open while Medical Officer Maryam prodded a wet organ loose.  “That’s just another prank, right?”

Megido flinched, and traded a glance with deckswab Nitram, who had drifted up with the repair chass on his withered lap, bound to his hoverchair.

Ampora bent his regal frame to lean his elbows atop the command console, smoothing his thumbs against his temples, eyes clamping shut behind thickly framed glasses.  “The orders were to provide a dignified exile befitting the political hostage Zahhak alongside political refugees Nitram and Vantas.  I didn’t see any of you titsquirts raising your hands to stay behind when Captor went all redrom rogue to follow Vantas, so you’re going to say shit-all about it to me now.”

Leijon bristled, stepping toward the dias with a tremor in her clenched fist.  “You know that's not why Sollux left, and what do you mean by political hostage Zahhak?  I thought we were just pranking some chumps so they’d humble out a bit, stop hacking our blogs or leaving sweaty towels on the dias maybe.”

Ampora banged the console with an open-hand slap, sneering. “Did nobody read the mission statement? Deliver Vantas each inspection per survey regulation, drop the rest of the cargo on the soonest planet confirmed habitable.  If any one of you mutinous plebians object, I'm to abandon you similarly and file a report on traitors of the Empire, so -”

Megido, voice cold with her hollow accent, “That was _your_ mission statement, the one only you were meant to read.”  She slaps a tool down on the deploy console, eyes milking over with telekinetic concentration to multi-task the relay satellite from the duster ship - an inch of grey visible through the wide dark window overhead.  “The one Sollux found when he was hacking your files.”

Leijon, recovering from her shock, “You can’t just leave Equius behind-!” but the indignant fury she and the witnessing crew had started to voice was interrupted by an ear-splitting explosion over the comms, the satellite that had just launched now nothing more than a pocket of spacefire glittering orange and red light across the bridge.  The duster beside it blistered and bubbled and blossomed into fiery debris, comms falling silent as Megido's rust-red eyes recolored, connection denied.

A hiss of static signal eked out from every screen and console, resolving into a snicker, a video of Sollux Captor’s ruined face lighting up the room, sharp teeth bared in a gloating cackle.  “Report thith, Ampora,” Captor quipped, fingers steepling up in front of the camera with his thumbs tucked to resemble the caliginous spade.  “And good luck exthplaining to Makara how you completely failed thith mithion and lotht a thionic navigator from hith fleet.”  The screen cut to live footage of the burning satellite, Sollux’s voice fading out in a crooning whisper,  “Thuck eggth, capetard.”

First Officer Serket started chuckling, then laughing, then cackling uncontrollably.  “Well,” she gasped, to answer the nonplussed silence of the rest of the crew.  “At least we know who the fuck put Ampora down for their quadrant.”

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End file.
